Social Media

Twitter Still Down for T-Mobile?

Yesterday, we noted that the downtime for some Twitterers has been going on a bit longer than the scheduled downtime that was supposed to happen today (which, incidentally, never occurred). My T-Mobile phone reported the same error that @lternageek has been reporting for several days: that all messages to 40404 (that is to say, Twitter's SMS gateway number) are failing. Twitter, today, noticed the many messages posted over at GetSatisfaction regarding the outage, that for some, has lasted for more than three days. Today, they updated the public on the issue:

We've been tracking a missed connection between T-Mobile and Twitter for the past few days. If you're a T-Mobile customer using Twitter in the United States over our shortcode 40404, you may see intermittent failures (both with sending and receiving updates). We're working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience!

Update (12/15 3p): We're still working on this and believe it to be a technical issue happening between T-Mobile and the folks who help run our text messaging. At this time we do not believe it to be a policy issue (as has been speculated). We're hoping for a resolution soon and will let you know when we know more.

Update (12/15 4:30p): We've received word this issue has been resolved. We'll continue to watch closely and let you know if anything changes.

Meanwhile, folks like myself still using T-Mobile to occasionally connect to the Twitter network are still are recieving the same error every time we attempt to connect to the Twitter SMS gateway: "Message sending failed."While Twitter is trying to put a game face on this one by intimating they don't believe it to be an act of malice by T-Mobile, manymany accounts of interactions with customer service over at T-Mobile are leaving with a much different impression:

Finally I spoke with someone in Customer Relations and she felt strongly enough about this that she got a tech on the phone. After waiting for the tech to research the issue they came back with a response (and the rep I was spoeaking with was as outraged as I was). Their official response was that T-Mobile does not support third party messaging services and the reason why I am all of a sudden unable to send messages to the Twitter service is because their system "caught up to the bug." I specifically asked if this meant I should expect to never be able to send to Twitter again and the answer was yes.

Almost everyone on T-Mobile we've talked to is now having the same experience. The only person with a different experience reported is Rafe Needleman from CNet late yesterday:

Hi. One of our cellphone editors here at CNET was able to send Twitter via TMobile SMS. Can you confirm that you are still locked out?

We're still waiting on an official response from our friend inside T-Mobile, but given that it's the weekend, we don't expect to hear back until early Monday morning. Meanwhile, online, IM, Web, API and other forms of mobile access aside from T-Mobile's network seems to be working, despite the earlier scheduled downtime.

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